Is the cause of destiny an attitude towards life, or is it the people or places we have known? Edith Wharton shows in her book Ethan Frome how choices determine each person's destiny. Ethan Frome tells the story of a man who marries a woman he doesn't love and soon falls in love with his wife's cousin. As the plot unfolds, Ethan is forced to make decisions that will either lead him to the life of love he seeks, or lead him down the path of defeat and failure. The choices he makes will affect how his future is revealed, and the author, Edith Wharton, examines and explains this through his plot, the conflicts that arise, and the story's use of irony in order to understand why this theme. is true. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The choices Ethan makes are major plot steps that provide an opening for the next step later in the book. When “He asked [Zeena] to stay with him” (Wharton 29), Ethan makes his first choice which leads to the next. This indicates how marrying Zeena changes his life as he takes a different path. On top of that, instead of falling in love with the girl he married, Ethan starts to like Mattie, which moves the plot forward even further. “Oh Matt, I can’t let you go!” (Wharton 70) He said, confessing his love to her. He can't love his wife, and when he falls in love with Mattie, it changes his whole life. These choices move the plot forward and make the rest of the story hinge on them. The author also establishes Ethan's character at the beginning and end of the book to show that his choices lead to his sad life within the plot. At the very beginning of the book, Ethan is depicted as a man who has gone through devastating events that caused him to have "something dark and unapproachable in his face..." (Wharton 1). This shows how the reader knows that Ethan's life is full of tragedy and how his choices lead to it. Ethan's life is not only set out at the beginning of the book; his life is also summed up at the end by saying “…He is the one who suffers the most” (Wharton 77). This indicates the effect of all his bad choices: sad and full of suffering. With this in mind, the plot explains Ethan's life in the prologue and epilogue to begin and end the harsh life of Ethan Frome. Ethan's inner conflicts lead him to make quick and uncertain decisions that lead to bad outcomes. His poor choice when he asked Zeena to stay was based on conflict with himself. “He was seized with an irrational fear of being left alone… [And] before he knew what he was doing, he had asked her to stay there with him” (Wharton 29). Ethan fights with himself because he doesn't want to be alone and forgotten, so he tries to end this conflict by making an easy choice: he asks her to stay. On top of that, Ethan is in conflict not only with himself but with his life in general. He felt that “the sweetness of Mattie’s confession…made the other vision more odious, the other life more intolerable” (Wharton 71). This led him to make the wrong choice of committing suicide rather than facing his life and ruining what he had in the long run. The conflict with Ethan's wife is also the effect of poor decision-making in the story. Ethan's poor choice to hide the broken dish rather than confront his wife causes conflict with her. When he “…assembled the pieces…[so] that close inspection convinced him of the impossibility of detecting…that the dish was broken” (Wharton 36), he opened up a new form of deception that caused thedispute. If he had only told her that the dish broke when she got home, he could have avoided the worst of the conflict with her. Even more, Ethan falls in love with Mattie, which causes conflicts with his wife. He first has an argument with Zeena, caused by his choice to love Mattie. Zeena jealously declares, "'I've kept her here a whole year: it's someone else's turn now'" (Wharton 49) when she announces that she is sending Mattie away. If Ethan hadn't fallen in love with Mattie, then Zeena might not have wanted to send her away, leading to an argument between the couple. If Ethan had not chosen to commit adultery, then he may not have caused the conflict between him and his wife. Ethan's conflict with poverty and slavery leads to poor decisions based on feelings of petulance. Ethan's choice not to strengthen his relationship with his wife causes the story to grow during their first argument. When it is revealed that "this was the first scene of open anger between the couple in their sad seven years" (Wharton 48), the reader finally understands why they were not the best couple. They've never fought before, but they still don't try to act like spouses when they could have known each other and fallen in love. Not only the communication problem between the couple, but also Ethan's choice to stay and take care of Zeena. rather than going back to college, it ramps up the intensity. Ethan decides to stay and take on the burden of his family members and the farm. “Someone had to stay and take care of people. You should never warn anyone other than Ethan. » (Wharton 2) It's true that he had to take care of them, but he didn't have to marry Zeena and he could have gone back to college. Unfortunately, because he decided to bring her back to the family, he was taken prisoner and had to live out the rest of his days with her at home. His two choices of marrying Zeena and not loving her cause conflict with Ethan and problems with the rest of his life. Ethan Frome's irony broadens the reader's mind, allowing them to better understand decision-making. This shows how decisions may not all be the best even when they seem like them and how the dramatic irony at the end lets the reader know that Ethan is ruining his life by going down that hill. The irony also shows how ironic Ethan himself is as a character. The decisions he makes seem good at the time, but, ironically, they all turn out for the worst. It seems good that he fell in love with Mattie because she was a good person, and when they were alone together, "he would have liked to stay...with her all night in the dark" (Wharton 19) because it seemed just that they should be together. Since falling in love with Mattie, Zeena's jealousy grows, plunging the couple into a tragic future. Mattie is not just another person; she was also vivacious and that's exactly what Ethan needed in his life. Ethan was captivated by Mattie because she looked like bright summer compared to Zeena's cold winter. When “[Ethan] kept his eyes fixed on [Mattie], marveling at the way her face changed with every turn of their conversation, like a wheat field in a summer breeze” (Wharton 38), he knew that he needed the life in her that his wife didn't have. If he had only tried to create Zeena that way, they could have been happy. Ever since he fell in love with Mattie, Ethan's life has fallen apart. In the last choice of the book, the reader mostly knows how this is going to happen, so the dramatic irony reveals Ethan's true destiny rather than the one he sought through the